Co-design of public spaces for pedestrian use and soft-mobility in the perspective of communities reappropriation and activation

Safe mobility in urban areas can be approached from the point of view of urban design-oriented through community integration and development. At the scale of the neighbourhood, mobility is assumed as key access for the comparison and the linking between local mobility policies and redevelopment of public space by the one hand, spontaneous reappropriations of public spaces as emerged since the pandemic, by the other. A peculiar case study, a neighbourhood in the north of Milan (Dergano), is useful to challenge pedestrian mobility policies in relation to the co-design of safer and liveable street spaces. It is part of ongoing research related to the identification and design − in collaboration with local partners and citizens − of an emerging ecosystem made of innovative practices, the format of services, spatial devices and forms of collaboration. Spatial and environmental criticalities in the area are caused by the scarce presence of green and pedestrian spaces, car prevailing streets − but also an overabundance of abandoned and underused former productive sites. The context is experiencing, in the last year, a phenomenon of re-appropriation of urban open spaces through the organization of cultural and educational small activities in support of the categories which are suffering more the pandemic’s restriction such as children, elderly people, mothers, and parents in general, poor families, foreign new inhabitants. Those practices could be integrated into a wider reorganization of mobility and in the redesign of more comfortable streets, which is partially ongoing by means of the Milan Municipality, in the perspective of the achievement of the 15-minute city model, accessible and rich in services. The paper describes policies and emerging practices in order to produce a more comprehensive representation of the double perspective. The result is an inclusive narrative of the neighbourhood from the point of view of pedestrian safer areas and new possibilities of connection between traditional public services and new uses of the site. In this direction, the proposed approach could be further tested through the application of immersive understanding and of similar design tools in broader contexts and situations, verifying the effectiveness of an open methodology to shorten the distance between bottom-up and top-down initiatives regarding pedestrian and public space.